PD Programs for Teachers

Informal Learning Opportunities for Teachers

Want to spend the summer learning about technology? We're pleased to host a number of professional development experiences for teachers during the summer!

This is a list of events currently scheduled for teachers during Summer 2017. Please check back throughout the Spring as new opportunities are announced.

SPARCS - Middle School Teachers

SPARCS is a National Science Foundation supported program for middle school teachers who want to learn more about computer science and computational thinking. Through a combination of summer and school-year professional development, teachers learn fundamental computational thinking skills, build lesson plans that integrate these skills into their content area, and practice teaching these new lessons. SPARCS is open to teachers from all content areas, and no experience with computer science is needed.

Nebraska GenCyber Camp - High School Teachers

Our country's national and economic security is highly dependent upon a strong cybersecurity workforce. Despite this need, according to Bureau of Labor statistics, nearly 210,000 cybersecurity positions went unfilled in 2015 alone. This shortfall of cybersecurity professionals in the workforce has left national agencies and corporations scrambling to meet security needs. Unfortunately, current secondary school curricula across the country, and in Nebraska, leave students and educators with minimal or no exposure to cybersecurity topics. Addressing this need, the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) will partner with Bellevue University and AIM, a Nebraska not-for-profit institution with the mission of building Nebraska’s IT talent pipeline, to offer the 2017 Nebraska GenCyber Camp (NGC) for local high school students (grades 9 & 10) and educators from around the area and country. NGC will help narrow the cybersecurity workforce gap by introducing educators and students to cybersecurity through active, hands-on, activities in ways that build a pipeline towards information security careers for students in camp and empower teachers to integrate cybersecurity into their own classrooms to widen that pipeline to include students in their home school districts.

WRIST: Wearable Research for In-Service STEM Teachers (RET) - High School Teachers

The objective of the WRIST RET site program is to engage high school technology and STEM teachers in cutting-edge research projects in wearable computing and related areas. The program consists of a six-week immersive summer research experience under direct faculty mentorship. Teachers can select from a variety of projects ranging from activity recognition using a wrist accelerometer, to software engineering principles for wearable application development, to computational wearables in fashion. Teachers will use their results to design an innovative lesson, which they will present at a one-day spring workshop. Learn More.

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